Nvidia Drivers cause hard freezes when playing heavily taxing games

[Sozzky]

This is just basically a post copy from the nvidia forum, haven't got any help there, so thought ill post here. Any help is appreciated.


Alright so I've had this problem for a while. If I play a game that puts a heavy load on the pc, after some time it starts hard freezing my pc without any warning, there may be nothing special happening in game, maybe just sitting in a base or smth. The freezes last for 20-30seconds, unfreeze for 5 seconds and then freezes again for 20-30, this continues until i manage to kill the game task or hard reset pc through a button on pc. What's worst is that even after restarting, the freeze happens a few seconds after logging back into windows. Programs start loading in and the same freezes start. The only fix I've found is uninstalling the Nvidia Drivers with or without DDU and switching back to older version. Rolled back to 359.06 or something like that, everything was ok for like a month, though I haven't really played anything really taxing. Today, I was playing Empyrion: Galactic Survival for around 6 hours, everything was normal, no freezes, ect. On the evening, a friend got the game, decided to hop on multiplayer. I've noticed that it said, that multiplayer requires more resources than SP, but I just ignored it. Hosted a server and everything was alright for 10 minutes. After that the freeze happened again. Tried killing the game task, kinda worked, but after trying to play again, froze on main menu. Killed task again, restarted pc normally, froze on desktop seconds after logging in. Hard reset and safe mode, no freezes(In safe mode), uninstalled driver with DDU, no freezes in normal mode. Reinstalled drivers, freezes at launch again. So here I am, sitting with the factory drivers, looking at the broken 1600x1200 resolution on a 16:9 and looking for help. Anyone had this happen to them? Any tips on how to fix it?
tl;dr:

-PC hard freezes for 30 seconds with 5 second pauses without warning on heavily taxing games, like PUBG,ARK.
-PC keeps freezing on desktop even after restarting, doesn't freeze in safe mode though.
-The only thing that stops the freezes is a Nvidia Driver uninstall. With DDU or without it.
-Before, switching back to older version like 359.06 helped, but last time even installing that causes the freezes.


The freezes are unconsistant:
- Sometimes it freezes everything completely: voice chat, game, desktop, mouse.
- Sometimes i can still move the mouse.
- Sometimes I cant do anything, but can hear the person i speak to and he can hear me.
- Other times i can do something for a while, but it freezes after a few seconds aswell.

8GB RAM.
CPU: i5-3750K
OS: Win 7 64bit.
GPU: GTX 660, used for around 4-5 years, may be overclocked, bought the whole pc, didn't touch it, but said it was preclocked, no experience in that field so no idea.
The games that caused me to freeze so far: ARK, PUBG and lastly today, Empyrion: Galactic Survival.
Other programs usually running in background: Razer Synapse, Discord.

Any help is appreciated, feel free to ask for other stuff that may be useful in finding the problem.

PS: Going off soon, so may not reply instantly.

EDIT: Windows update automatically installed 385.69. No crashed in desktop so far, but haven't tried playing yet. Still, the problem can still possibly happen, so any help is hugelly appreciated.

[Sozzky]

bump

[ReBoot]

Check the PSU, itay be too weak or plain and simple dying.